Taylor Swift's 'Speak Now': Take that

Heck hath no fury like a songwriter scorned, and Taylor Swift has the deadliest of combinations at her disposal: a poison pen and a massive audience.

There are 14 songs on Speak Now (Big Machine ***), Swift's highly enjoyable, a-tad-too-long new album, and, as she writes in the CD booklet's "Prologue," all are "open letters. Each is written with a specific person in mind, telling them what I meant to tell them in person."

In the most entertaining episodes on Speak Now, the third full-length effort by the Wyomissing-raised, golden-tressed 20-year-old singer who sold more albums in 2008 and 2009 than any other artist, what Swift meant to say was something like "you did me wrong, buddy. And now it's payback time."

Or as she puts it herself in the Prologue's P.S.: "To all the boys who inspired this album, you should've known. ;)"

And, indeed, they would have, if they'd been paying attention to the body of work of the leggy singer-songwriter, who wrote the words and music to all of the songs on Speak Now, rather than her other attributes. Going back to her 2006 country-pop debut Taylor Swift, the guitarist and songwriter has been settling scores with wayward beaus on tunes like "Picture to Burn," in which she warned: "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy / That's fine, I'll tell mine you're gay."

The difference is that now that Swift is a global pop Grammy-winning superstar, the foolhardy fellows in line for comeuppance - or, in some cases, forgiveness - are famous folk who, like her, populate the Web pages of celebrity gossip sheets.

Case in Point No. 1 would be John Mayer, the 33-year-old guitarist and heartbreak specialist who was linked with Swift last year and who would surely seem to be the subject of "Dear John."

(Swift has not officially ID'd which song goes with which household name, though in many instances her subjects are obvious, such as rapper Kanye West, the subject of the patronizing and rather tepid "Innocent," who spoiled Swift's MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech in 2009 and who "I forgive for what he said in front of the whole world.")

Forgiveness is not in the cards for the soulless perpetrator in "Dear John," an almost seven-minute, never-boring power ballad that shouts J'accuse! to a scalawag with a "sick need to give love and then take it away," letting him know that "all the girls that you've run dry / Have tired, lifeless eyes / Cause you've burned them out."